1
A UNIQUE NAME
Burdened with a Bold Mission
Mecca: Dawn, Monday, April 21, 570 CE
Without fresh dates the woman in labor could bleed to death.
As soon as ‘Abdul-‘Uzza received word after midnight that his sister-in-law was in labor, he had sent a horseman rushing to the nearby town of Ta`if to fetch fresh dates from the local groves. The dates had to be picked at once to maintain the potency of their juicy nectar. The midwives of Mecca relied on an elixir of fresh unrefined date juice to stimulate uterine contractions, helping to push the baby through the birth canal quickly and protect the mother from excessive bleeding.
Now ‘Abdul-‘Uzza was frantic, as the birth could come at any moment. The next hour would determine whether mother and child would survive the precarious delivery. Pacing in the courtyard doorway, he anxiously surveyed the horizon. As dawn broke, a cloud of dust arose in the distance. Then, a veiled horseman emerged, galloping through Mecca’s southern pass to deliver his emergency package: twenty succulent dates known as rutab (luscious).
Thuwaibah, a young enslaved Greek woman, stood by the door with an earthen clay platter. ‘Abdul-‘Uzza grabbed the package from the horseman and quickly poured its contents onto the plate. Thuwaibah, known for her speed and agility, sprinted out of her master’s courtyard with the date platter.
Zigzagging through narrow alleyways, Thuwaibah dodged pecking hens and young shepherds and their sheep on their way to grazing grounds outside the city. She dashed past women carrying cloth-covered dough, as the aroma of freshly baking barley bread blended with the fragrance of acacia wood crackling in Mecca’s ovens.
Living up to her name (bearer of gifts), Thuwaibah tightly clutched the plate as she wove between women balancing clay water jars on their heads outside the Zamzam Well, Mecca’s main freshwater source. In the Ka‘bah shrine beside the well, white-clad priests with shaven heads and emerald-encrusted gold amulets lit frankincense. Burning the precious spice marked a new-day thanksgiving offering to the city’s 360 crudely carved idols.
Thuwaibah’s master had much at stake. If the lady in labor did not birth a son, he—as the brother of her recently deceased husband—could be expected to sire a male heir on his brother’s behalf. If her labor failed, it would mark yet another tragedy for a family still reeling from a terrible loss.
As she passed the Ka‘bah, Thuwaibah descended the Marwah hill, running faster down the incline toward the simple three-room mud-brick house. Inside, a frail baby made his own tenuous journey through the darkness of his mother’s birth canal toward the early morning light. Awaiting him was a world laden with challenges and obstacles—a world he would soon be tasked with changing.
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Throughout his life, Muhammad remained deeply conscious that he had nearly never been born.
Every Monday, he would refrain from eating and drinking during daylight hours. When asked why he fasted, Muhammad replied, “That was the day on which I was born.” In sixth-century Arabia, many people did not even know the year of their birth, let alone the day of the week. Yet Muhammad not only held on to this fact, he reminded himself of it every week.
The details of Muhammad’s unlikely birth were well known to him, thanks to the eyewitness testimony of his lifelong foster mother, Barakah. When Thuwaibah burst through the door of the delivery room at dawn on that Monday morning, it was Barakah who took the date platter from her and passed it to the midwife.
Like Thuwaibah, Barakah was a slave. She had been abducted as a child in Abyssinia, ripped from her elite family and sold into bondage thousands of miles from home. Muhammad’s grandfather ‘Abdul-Muttalib purchased her as a gift for his beloved son ‘Abdullah. But ‘Abdullah had died just two months earlier, leaving Barakah to take care of her widowed mistress, Aminah.
In the lantern-lit delivery room, Aminah lay on the floor atop a palm-fiber mattress. The frail twenty-year-old struggled to push the baby out. At her side, an experienced midwife named Ash-Shifa (healing) took the fresh dates and squeezed their juices into Aminah’s mouth, smearing her lips and urging her to swallow. From the other side, Barakah poured water from a flask into Aminah’s mouth to help wash down the date juice as the woman struggled to drink amid painful contractions.
No one expected Aminah to live. Tension filled the room as the three attendants braced for what they expected would be the last moments of this poor woman’s life and hoped at least to avoid a stillbirth. Lingering unspoken was the misfortune Aminah had endured over the past few weeks.
Less than a year after marrying her childhood sweetheart, Aminah had bid ‘Abdullah farewell as he departed on his trading trip to the Mediterranean port of Ashkelon, hundreds of miles to the northwest. Every morning Aminah stood with Barakah on the outskirts of Mecca awaiting the return of ‘Abdullah’s caravan while a growing baby kicked inside her. At last, on February 15, the women sighted a lone rider advancing on the horizon wearing ‘Abdullah’s distinctive indigo cloak—another gift from his father. Drawing near, the horseman uncovered his face; he was Aminah’s cousin Sa‘ad.
“Where is ‘Abdullah?!” Aminah cried. Barakah watched as Sa‘ad broke the news of ‘Abdullah’s unexpected death from the plague during the caravan trip. Aminah’s knees buckled as she fainted.
For two weeks, a heartbroken Aminah cried on Barakah’s shoulder. Fearing that the trauma would induce a miscarriage, Barakah tried to sooth her mistress, who struggled to eat. As the two young women huddled at dusk in a dimly lit room, Aminah’s brother-in-law Al-‘Abbas dashed into the room to warn them that an Abyssinian general was marching up from Yemen to besiege Mecca with a massive army headed by thirteen colossal war elephants. Barakah had to escort her feeble mistress through treacherous terrain to a refuge on a mountaintop outside the city. When the siege subsided several weeks later, the beleaguered Aminah returned to her bedroom even frailer than before.
In her weakened condition, Aminah could sense mounting pressure from ‘Abdullah’s family, who expected her to deliver a male heir. Her in-laws were no ordinary Meccan family. ‘Abdul-Muttalib was the city’s chief elder, and ‘Abdullah had been his favorite among seventeen children. The entire city awaited the outcome of her pregnancy.
Amid all this stress, Aminah was without the support of her own family. She was an only child and not a Meccan native but rather a recent transplant from the distant oasis of Yathrib. Her parents remained several hundred miles away, oblivious of their daughter’s tragic condition.
Aminah pushed with every ounce of her remaining strength. Against all odds, she suddenly heard the cries of a baby, delivered into the capable hands of Ash-Shifa. The baby was frail, but he had made it. ‘Abdullah had a male heir!
Barakah immediately took the boy and bathed him in a basin of warm water she had prepared with myrrh and sage. She patted him dry with a cotton cloth, then wrapped him in an emerald-green silk shawl, a gift from his grandfather, who had ordered it from Persia to serve as an omen that the baby might lead a comfortable life. Barakah handed the infant to Aminah, who cradled the boy with tears in her eyes.
Thuwaibah rushed out of the room to herald the news. She sprinted through the alleyways to Mecca’s main square and rushed up to ‘Abdul-Muttalib, who was sitting outside the Ka‘bah with a group of city elders. “It’s a boy!” she gushed, before dashing off again to her master’s house. Overjoyed at the great news, a beaming ‘Abdul-‘Uzza declared, “Thuwaibah, you are now a free woman!”
Meanwhile, ‘Abdul-Muttalib had immediately set off to meet his new grandson. In the home of his late son, he approached his daughter-in-law, who was still lying on the mattress. Aminah struggled to raise the baby toward his grandfather. Barakah stepped in to pass the infant to him. ‘Abdul-Muttalib lifted the boy and gazed at him silently. ‘Abdul-Muttalib, as Mecca’s leading elder, had named hundreds of the city’s newborns over the years, but now it was time to name the surviving grandson who would carry on the lineage of his beloved ‘Abdullah.
After a long pause, ‘Abdul-Muttalib looked into the boy’s eyes and declared, “I name him ‘Muhammad’!”
The midwives turned in shock. They had never heard this name before. The women were confused by an archaic Semitic root, H-M-D, not commonly used in Mecca, and asked, “Why did you choose a new name?”
‘Abdul-Muttalib explained, “I named him ‘the exemplary role model’ so that his example would be exulted in the highest places and his name would come to be known among the nations.”
The women responded with joyful ululations welcoming little Muhammad into the world.
The midwives did not ask ‘Abdul-Muttalib to elaborate on the meaning and origins of his unusual choice. The root H-M-D describes someone standing on an elevated platform who demonstrates actions to be emulated by onlookers. The quality of his example is so impressive that it inspires other people, such as a master carpenter modeling how to shape wood into beautiful designs for eager apprentices.
In naming his grandson, ‘Abdul-Muttalib not only revived this archaic term but placed it in a grammatical form with an M at the beginning. The prefix transformed the root action described from something finite to something timeless. Rather than a onetime action, Muhammad describes a constant state of doing, perpetually inspiring desire in others to emulate his example.
The name did not come out of thin air. As the Qur`an would later explain about Muhammad, “they can find him written in the Jewish Scriptures.” The Old Testament uses the root H-M-D sixty-five times, with the plural form, Mahamadim, appearing in the Song of Songs (5:16) and “M’hamudeha” in the Book of Lamentations (1:7)—not to mention tehmod (covet, or desire) in the Ten Commandments. ‘Abdul-Muttalib had fashioned a new biblical name for his grandson—reflecting his own maternal roots in the city of Yathrib, where he had spent the first eight years of his life with his mother’s Jewish family.
‘Abdul-Muttalib created the moniker not to honor but to challenge his grandson: be great to help others be great. His name would serve as a reminder—both to others and to himself—of his lifelong mission. The name had action built into it, a dynamic of perpetual striving.
‘Abdul-Muttalib returned his grandson to Aminah’s arms. He grabbed a moist date from the platter and squeezed its juicy contents onto Muhammad’s lips, a ritual called tahnik (consecration, initiation). Then he let mother and baby rest for an hour.
Later, with the morning sun shining, ‘Abdul-Muttalib stepped out of the house with his new grandson wrapped in the shawl. As the chief walked through Mecca’s streets toward the Ka‘bah, the crowds parted and looked on with concern: Was there a live or dead baby in the shawl? Rumor had spread that both mother and child had died. The citizens of Mecca had come to offer their condolences.
‘Abdul-Muttalib ascended the seven stairs leading up to the only entrance to the black cube. At the top, he slowly turned, raising his hands and the baby toward the sky. Beaming at the child’s face, he declared, “This is my son, a gift from heaven, born in honor, a source of coolness to my liver and soothing to my eyes.” The Meccan crowd understood the liver as the symbolic container of intense emotions. ‘Abdul-Muttalib was acknowledging that beneath his stoic exterior he had been devastated by the loss of his beloved son. The grandfather’s rare moment of public candor only heightened the joy shining from his face.
Then, ‘Abdul-Muttalib added, “I have named him Muhammad!” Murmurs of confusion arose. What was that name? It sounded foreign. ‘Abdul-Muttalib could see their puzzled looks, so he repeated his earlier explanation to the midwives.
Sixty years later, the newborn he now held would return as an adult to Mecca after years in exile and stand on the same top step of the Ka‘bah. In the crowd would be some of the same people who had witnessed the first public declaration of his name—only now the name was known among nations. Closing a circle, Muhammad would declare, “I am the son of ‘Abdul-Muttalib!”
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Copyright © 2021 by Mohamad Jebara